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Blankman

Not that Blankman (though I do have the soundtrack to that exceptionally fine film), but more like blank-site-man. Why bother with a website if I can't post something in two weeks, honestly. You'd think I hadn't done anything in the last two weeks.

Well, I haven't really.

I take that back, I got to play Guitar Hero, and that was cool. I definitely need that game.

Last week I tried to get the Xbox 360 on Tuesday, but I really didn't put forth much of an effort. I just showed up at Costco, and while they had games, there were no systems to be found. Unfortunate. :-( Now I'm left to wallow in the sorry muck of 480p sadness until I can find one (but I don't mind waiting until I can find a premium system, instead of the core).

On Friday I made it to my annual Black Friday shopping trip with the Millers, however this year I bought less than ever. We showed up at Best Buy at 2am to try to get the $379 laptop (I was trying to pick one up on behalf of my aunt), but there were already 200 people there. Fortunately it wasn't that cold, so we stayed there in line anyway, knowing full well that there were no laptops to be had at that spot in line.

In the end, all I bought for myself was a $5 video game and a $6 movie (Pinball Hall of Fame and Anchorman). Bought a router for my aunt, and a couple Christmas gifts for others that were sorta on sale. All in all I saved less than $20 myself, and sat outside the store for three hours to do it - I'm a genius! :-P

Went to Circuit City after that, where I bought...nothing. In terms of purchasing, this was pretty much the lamest Black Friday for me, but the day has been more about hanging out with friends that I don't get to see that often anymore, and that's good.

Of course, ASU played UA on Friday as well, with the result I was hoping for (though it was entirely too close).

I'm supposed to be playing golf around the end of December, so I decided to hit up the driving range this weekend, and it went surprisingly well. Drivers were going long and relatively straight. I was actually hitting irons into some of the nets placed out there, so that was good. Had a bit of a push/fade with the longer clubs, felt like it was from not turning my wrists over enough, but it wasn't a big deal. Shanked a few wedges, that was a big deal, as that should never happen. :-P

On a related note, I thought about joining the Men's Club at Ken McDonald the other day, as it might provide me with some motivation to actually play golf regularly. Tournaments twice a month all year long, plus I'd have a real handicap again. Not a bad deal at all.

Finally, the new Chandler Costco opens up this Thursday. :-D

Moneypit Neon Strikes Again

It really struck a while back, but I finally got around to spending the money this weekend. $112 for a new driver's side door key cylinder and a coolant temperature sensor.

The car survived an attempted breakin a couple weeks ago, requiring the new cylinder. All sorts of fun getting the door apart, and I only lost one part! Well, I didn't really lose it, because it's still in the door somewhere, but it's not where it should be. ;-) Anyway, I can lock/unlock the door from the outside now, and that's what matters.

I think the coolant temp sensor is what's causing the car to stall, ever since I put the new head on. The symptoms seem right according to the service manual. Also, I have zero recollection of ever swapping the sensor from the old head to the new head, so maybe this one came with a sensor, and it was bad? I don't even know now. The first step in replacing the sensor reads "Drain the coolant below the level of the sensor." So...how do I know when to stop? The car has only seen about 600 miles of use since the head was replaced six months ago, that's pretty sad. So tempted to sell, but then I see an STS Neon setup page, and realize I have most of the necessary parts already...

Woo compressed air

I finally bought the air compressor that Costco has been selling, since they got another batch of them in the other day. Fit in the Saab perfectly. ;-) Came with the following, from my memory:
- impact gun
- air hammer
- air rotary tool with a handful of attachments
- tire inflation tool (a lame one and a nice one)
- spray gun (HVLP I'd imagine)
- air brush
- 25' air hose
- a few impact sockets (only SAE though)
- um...some other stuff

What's missing from that list? Well, most obvious is the tool I'd probably use most, an air ratchet. I could use an extension cord as well, since my only stupid electrical outlet is in the ceiling in the middle of the garage, and the compressor is not going to sit in the middle of the garage. :-P

Oh no

Costco is carrying pecan pies once again. Must...resist...gigantic...pie...

Rebirth of azsolo2 forums

About a month away from the 3-year anniversary of the azsolo2.com forum installation, it will finally be getting its first upgrade. I emailed the hosting company last week asking them to upgrade php on our system to meet minimum requirements for the latest version of the software, but I never heard back from them. Just yesterday I find out that they did infact upgrade it for me. :-) I went ahead and bought the forum upgrade, and just this morning put in my request to have it upgraded (included in the cost). I would expect that to be done today or tomorrow. This should fix the numerous security issues we have with running such an old unpatched piece of software, and we'll have access to all future upgrades.

I got my hands on an Xbox 360 demo kiosk the other day, that was kind of cool. The whole startup sequence and Live! interface looked pretty nice on the little LCD HDTV. :-D There were a handful of games listed on the demo disc, but most were just demo videos, and I believe there were just two playable demos: Call of Duty 2 and Kameo.

I started with COD2, and while it looked good, the controls instantly frustrated me - no invert look, so I was all over the place. No option to reconfigure that either. About five seconds in, I was done.

Moving on the Kameo...oh wait, I couldn't. I started it up, and I got an error message saying something to the effect of "Your disc appears to be dirty or scratched, please clean it and try again." Pretty slick.

I thought the controller felt kind of cheap compared to the current Xbox controllers, but I don't know how much of that was due to the weight, which I thought was less than the current controller. I have no idea how a white controller is going to stay clean, either. :-P

The sky is falling! or, Costco let me down today

I go to the food court for lunch, and they have new cash registers. Registers which, for whatever reason, will not allow them to take the Costco Cash Card. It's my preferred form of payment, because it was the last lunch place I regularly went that didn't take credit cards, so the cash card meant I didn't need to carry cash any more. Now if I'm out of cash I'll need to go somewhere else. :-\

On the plus side today, I was happy to see 30mpg on my last tank, and gas prices at Costco dropped from $2.67 at the time of my last fillup to $2.52 today.

Update bonanza

This is exactly the problem with a website, the further behind I get, the less motivated I am to make a post, since each passing day means I have more to add. At some point my brain hits a limit though, and anything new I want to add means something else gets left behind. Or to paraphrase Homer, "Remember when we went to that wine tasting and I forgot how to drive?"

I think the last post I made was just before the Tucson autocross, where I planned to drive Dave's car. I had all sorts of problems with that. It was a really fast course, requiring a shift to third on two occasions. Rarely could I get the car from third into second gear cleanly, and on the last couple runs I even had trouble upshifting to third...I just couldn't find it. On top of that, a cone was called on my fastest run (I have no idea where), so I had to stand on a slow run. It really wasn't a good course to exhibit all of the car's abilities, which was unfortunate.

Car issues aside, the course design resulted in some..."event management" issues I guess. Due to the loop and crossover, launch intervals were in the neighborhood of 40 seconds, and even that often put two cars close to each other on course, where one car could easily spin out into another. On top of that we got 4 runs, and that made for a pretty long day.

This is where I totally forget everything that happened last week. I think I probably played some video games. A bit of GT4, some Halo 2. It's good to know that an entire week of my life can be boiled down to "I played video games."

Over this past weekend I noticed an odd noise on deceleration from around my front right wheel. When I finally went to check it out, I first noticed that I was missing a lugnut. Wait...that's not right. The other 3 were "fairly tight," in the same way that I was feeling "fairly stupid." As I'm mourning the loss of the poor lugnut, I notice something shiny on the back side of the wheel. Grease, and lots of it. That's rarely a good thing. Off comes the wheel, and the cv boot is torn all the way around the joint, tossing grease everywhere. Sweet.

My first trip to the dealer for the week, and I'm buying nothing but a lugnut, as I don't have any spares, and I'd rather not (knowingly) drive on three. The boot kit comes from BAP, and I drive up to Clint's place for yet another fine boot installation, which generally went well, except for some additional pain caused by my poly bushings in the LCA, and a broken cotter pin.

Second trip to the dealer for the week, this time to get some spare cotter pins. They don't have the exact one I'm looking for in saleable form, but the guy is nice enough to grab a handful of pins from some bins and just give them to me, saying "one of these should fit." Hooray.

I did in fact carve a pumpkin this year, and I finally tried using a stencil. I did The Cheat from homestarrunner.com, as it looked easy and recognizeable (well, if you know the site).

So that's about it, I think I'm caught up now.